Distribution of the Sensible (Ranciere)

Rancière uses “distribution of the sensible” to describe how a society decides what can be seen, said, and heard—what counts as common sense and who is allowed to participate in it. It is about how perception is organized, not only politics in the narrow sense but politics as aesthetics of the everyday. The phrase shows that visibility and invisibility are never neutral: some voices are amplified, others muted; some bodies are made central, others pushed to the edge. This distribution is always contested, always shifting, and often enforced by institutions, design, and space itself. For landscape architects, the concept asks whose presence a place acknowledges, and whose it denies. A park, a square, a street—all distribute the sensible by framing who feels at home, who feels excluded, who can linger and who is chased away. To design is therefore also to shape perception and belonging, consciously or not.

/ Alexandre Champagne

Today, the possibility arises to define a new design approach to address issues of environmental and social justice in the urban context. Based on an integrated understanding of the interdependencies involving human and environmental relations, the applied-philosophy approach for landscape architectural practices induces a paradigm shift in spatial design. Rather than applying downstream solutions to […]

/ Jevgeniy Bluwstein

Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, examines how the reductive Western view of landscapes reinforces colonization through exclusionary conservation practices, focusing on a case study of Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. Introducing the term “landscapism,” meaning the “double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscaping colonies,” Bluwstein offers a critical perspective, advocating for viewing landscapes through a lens of relationality.

/ Zaš Brezar

As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.

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